Sometimes PPC is a better option than SEO, and vice versa- it depends what your goals are. In the shorter term PPC is good for bolstering traffic and conversions while your SEO is taking off. It’s also good for deadly specific conversions as well as Sale and seasonal promotions. SEO is good for building website authority, increasing reach and growing conversions.

People often talk about using them together, but in reality they are using them in isolation- one tool for one distinct job.

There are scenarios where the two are best mates though, where they really can benefit each other, and you. Here’s a couple of examples.

SEO improves Quality Score
Google operates a Quality Score system in AdWords. The score contributes to how much you pay for a click and how far up the paid rankings it appears. There are a handful of factors that go into making up the score:
Click-Through Rate
Ad Copy Relevance
Landing Page Load Time
Geographical Considerations
Landing Page Quality… this is sometimes called Landing Page Quality Score, which is a bit misleading. Drop the “score” and you’ll be fine.

SEO has the ability to improve the quality of a PPC landing page, and nothing else. This is because a well optimised site page simply fits the bill for a good PPC landing page. If the code is clean, the mark-up in good order, the page loads quickly and it is perfectly relevant to the keyword being targeted in the ad then your landing page is looking pretty good. This may seem like common sense but a little attention to coherent H tagging can make a difference. Another thing to remember is that Google has one bot for regular site crawling, one for calculating landing page quality, so the PageRank of a site page shouldn’t influence it’s score as a landing page.

PPC can test SEO Keywords
If you have the budget you can test keywords with PPC and then use them for SEO. This is an interesting option because, of the available keyword research tools, none are any good at predicting how those keywords might perform in the unique environment of your site.

In practice this means generating a list of likely keywords (as you would normally for SEO) and running a campaign using those keywords. Over time the number of clicks will start to give you a feel for likely SEO visit numbers, if you can get decent page one organic rankings for them of course.

Once you have enough statistically meaningful data from your PPC you can work on optimising your site and select pages with those keywords. Remember that this is a process, not a one hit activity, so it will need monitoring and revising.